Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in the number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructure support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones equipped with receivers and transmitters for communicating over a wireless network.
In order to facilitate communications and manage delivery of services to users of handheld mobile communication devices in an enterprise, it is known to use one or more enterprise servers. These servers provide functionality and components that monitor services (such as provided by additional attachment servers, web servers, etc.) as well as process, route, compress and encrypt data for transmission to and from handheld devices connected to the wireless network.
It is also known in the art to execute an administration program on a remote computer for the purpose of managing one or more enterprise servers. Such administration programs are complex and difficult to test due to the large amount of data, options, menus, links, and operations that may be performed. Although many automated scripts have been developed to automate user interface testing (e.g. automated GUI testing scripts such as Squish 1.1 by froglogic), it has been found that verifying proper functioning of the administration program and its interactions with other components such as the enterprise server, configuration database, etc., is a daunting task, and there are many details that a tester may miss while attempting to test the program. Most testers do not have the time, nor the patience to ensure that each and every menu option is in the correct place, and that it responds correctly when selected or clicked. Similarly, testers typically do not have sufficient time and/or patience to check the configuration database and enterprise server log files each time they perform an action that causes changes in the files.